There is a plethora of applications available for mobile devices in the market. More and more of these applications are using notifications, often referred to as “push notifications,” to engage end users by pushing information to them and potentially bringing the end users back to the applications. For instance, notifications allow any application running in the background to notify the end user of some activity and lure him/her back to its interface. As such, notifications have the potential to increase an application's usage multifold.
In some cases, end users have multiple applications on a user device that are registered to receive the same type of notification. Currently, when a notification server receives an originating notification, the notification server sends a notification to each application registered to receive that type of notification. This presents a problem as a message is displayed for each of the notifications such that multiple messages for the same originating notification are displayed on the user device. For instance, when two email applications are registered to receive notifications for incoming email messages, two messages are displayed each time an incoming email message is received. Having multiple messages displayed for the same originating notification is often annoying to end users. The only current solution to this problem is to give the end user the option to completely turn off notifications for an application.